Ryan Farisco

Professional Experience

• DevOps Principal Principle: Driven by fundamental philosophy "Every team should be able to build, deploy, and operate their own applications". Championed full-stack ownership principles, empowering engineers through the creation of self-service tools for the entire software development lifecycle
• Infrastructure Consolidation: Led post-merger migration and consolidation of application and database infrastructure, reducing operational complexity and cost
• LLM/AI Access: Implemented AWS Bedrock access for Claude models, enabling seamless local integration with various AI models for engineers to test capabilities and drive innovation
• Onboarding: Created a comprehensive onboarding process for new engineers, including training on infrastructure design, self-service and observability tools, resulting in measurable success by engineers confidently deploying their own applications within days of onboarding
• Project Management: Led multiple high impact projects from inception to completion, ensuring timely delivery and seamless integration resulting in measurable success
• Security Excellence: Implemented strict least-privilege security models across all self-service applications and cloud resources; managed external bug bounty program through hackerone.com
• Team Building: Successfully organized multiple in-person events to build team cohesiveness and increase communication levels, fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment; scaled team size by hiring and mentoring new engineers ensuring confidence in their abilities to succeed

• Cost Optimization: Implement cost allocation tags to be able to create reports to understand spend and utilization. Reports assisted in purchasing reserved instance contracts which resulted in significant cost savings.
• Operations: Identified a number of redundant infrastructure to be decommissioned entirely or replaced with a more accurate matched resource. Created real-time monitoring and graphs to monitor application / infrastructure metrics. Set up alerts against monitoring for any breaching thresholds
• Performance Efficiency: Ensure that version updates, security patches and any maintenance is scheduled and integrated promptly. Promote prototyping and proof of concept solutions utilizing serverless technologies.
• Reliability: Create automated containerized deployment process in ECS with stateless self-healing auto-scale groups to ensure that application resilience is paramount. Implement CircleCI and create CI/CD workflow into non-production environments.
• Security: Complete audit of all login accounts, IAM keys, load balancers, API keys/tokens. Identified and created a plan to mitigate against identified risks. Enforce principle of least privilege across all infrastructure. Enabled data encryption in transit and at rest. Enabled CloudTrail for accountability and tracing

• AWS Management: Total accountability for AWS with $35K monthly spend
• CI/CD & Mobile Deployment: Technical lead for multi-microservice CI/CD workflows; created iOS mobile app build and release automation
• Container Orchestration: Researched and implemented compute clusters for containerized application deployments
• Database Administration: End-to-end administration of multiple NoSQL databases from POC to production operations
• Team Management: Hired and managed a team of engineers to support the growth of the company, created onboarding processes and fostered a culture of continuous curiosity, learning and development

• Automation & Testing: Implemented deployment and testing automation utilizing JMeter load testing framework
• High Availability: Build and maintain uptime of high availability AWS environments. Extensively troubleshoot deployments, proactively monitor to resolve errors and mitigate accordingly.
• Multi-Region Operations: Responsible for entire AWS cloud infrastructure from development to production for pinchme.com and pinchme.com.au.
• Performance Optimization: Conducted infrastructure benchmarking and optimization initiatives to enhance system performance
• Technical Advisory: Guided engineering team with all AWS infrastructure related design and implementation.

• AWS Cloud Migration: Led strategic migration from on-premise to AWS infrastructure through competitive RFP process, delivering 60% cost reduction while improving scalability and reliability
• Infrastructure Leadership: Managed enterprise IT operations including production/development servers, network infrastructure, and business systems (CRM, email, collaboration) across hybrid cloud environment
• Active Directory Modernization: Executed complete domain restructure to support rapid business growth; implemented Hyper-V virtualization and group policies for enhanced network management
• M&A Integration: Provided technical leadership for getawaylounge.com.au (luxuryescapes.com) acquisition, managing seamless IT infrastructure integration and business system consolidation
• Service Delivery & Operations: Established enterprise helpdesk with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, defined SLAs/KPIs, and successfully consolidated two office locations with zero business disruption

• Global Infrastructure Management: Administered 14 servers (Windows Server 2003/2008, Linux) across 5 international sites (Beijing, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Los Angeles, Sydney) with multi-site WAN/VPN connectivity
• Enterprise Systems: Managed Active Directory, Exchange 2003/2007, Citrix Metaframe, SQL databases, and Symantec Backup Exec for business continuity
• Cloud Migration & Modernization: Led migration of on-premises infrastructure (Email, File Storage, Media Content) to cloud-based solutions, achieving significant cost savings and improved scalability
• Network & Telephony: Executed bandwidth upgrade projects and managed full VOIP migration from traditional telephony systems
• Business Applications: Maintained critical systems including Sage AccPac, INSONIC media management, SharePoint deployment, and video production suite with Final Cut Pro

Certifications

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate
• Customer Contact Certificate — ICT20102
• Microsoft Certified Professional — Windows 2000
• CompTIA Network+ — Certificate
• CompTIA A+ Operating Systems — Certificate
• CompTIA A+ Hardware — Certificate

Technical Skills